


Give or Take

by RoseisaRoseisaRose



Series: Lady Grey Extended Universe [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, Modern AU, and everyone is wearing argyle, annette just likes the drama, coffee shop AU, dedue just wants to not be a bother, mercedes just wants to be nice to people, tea shop technically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:27:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26886613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseisaRoseisaRose/pseuds/RoseisaRoseisaRose
Summary: Dedue was Mercedes’s favorite customer.He said please and thank you when he ordered. He cleaned off his table before he left. He made Annette smile when he spoke to her. He spoke softly. He left early the few times the shop was so busy they needed more tables. He wore plaid scarves and knitted sweaters or jeans and plain white t-shirts and he shook out his umbrella and left it by the door on days when it rained.The problems didn’t start until she decided she wanted him to know he was her favorite customer. After that, he was a disaster.Modern Day Mercedue AU featuring pumpkin rolls, mass paperback romance novels, cable-knit scarves, and enough Aggressive Faerghus Niceness to power a small city. Written for Mercedue Week 2020!
Relationships: Mercedes von Martritz/Dedue Molinaro
Series: Lady Grey Extended Universe [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1961659
Comments: 20
Kudos: 90





	Give or Take

Dedue always sat at the same table. That was the first thing Mercedes noticed about him. Well, he was built like a Mack truck and had hands that were bigger than her face, she noticed that real quick. But the _pattern_ she noticed first was that he always sat at the same table.

He was a man of patterns, which might have been why she started paying attention to him. He always wiped his shoes on the doormat three times each, first the toe then the heel then the whole foot. He always hung his jacket on his chair before sitting down. He didn’t come at consistent times, but he usually stayed for about two to three hours, longer than the usual customer. The thing that made him the most unusual was that he would order another mug of tea when he finished the first one, rather than buying one at the beginning of the day and riding it out the entire time he was there. Mercedes almost felt bad charging him, but she and Annette didn’t really have the money to start unlimited tea specials. Some days she asked herself why the two of them had opened a tea shop together in the first place. 

Not days when he was there, though.

Mercedes didn’t generally pay much attention to the customers – Annette was the face of the shop, for all intents and purposes. Mercedes could take over the register when things were busy, but she spent more time in the kitchens with her pastries. And when she was up front, when it was so busy that they needed more hands or when it was so slow that Annette could take a lunch break, Mercedes could barely tell one customer from another, even if Annette insisted they were regulars. But Dedue was different.

He brought in books with him, physical hard copies that had library labels on the spine, 400 pages of history and theology and 150-page paperback sci-fi classics and, one time, a popular children’s series that was going to be made into a movie later that year. He looked up from them, using his thumb as a bookmark as he closed the cover, to look her in the eye and say thank you when she brought him his order. Sometimes she asked about them.

“What’s that one about?” she asked, tilting her head to try to read the title.

“The rise and fall of the Adrestian Empire,” he said calmly. Mercedes could now read the title on the spine: _The Rise and Fall of the Adrestian Empire_.

“Is it as good as the one about the double agent against the Alliance who actually might be a triple agent _for_ the Alliance?” Mercedes asked, picking up his empty teacup and saucer and napkin. 

He frowned. “It’s difficult to say,” he said. “They’re very different.”

“Just let me know if you want more tea,” she said as an answer.

He said please and thank you when he ordered. He cleaned off his table before he left. He made Annette smile when he spoke to her. He spoke softly. He left early the few times the shop was so busy they needed more tables. He wore plaid scarves and knitted sweaters or jeans and plain white t-shirts and he shook out his umbrella and left it by the door on days when it rained. He was Mercedes’s favorite customer.

The problems didn’t start until she decided she wanted him to know he was her favorite customer. After that, he was a disaster.

*

It started simply enough. Annette had taken the afternoon off to get lunch with an old friend, but the shop was empty, regardless. Mercedes had gotten there early to finish the baking in time for when she would be manning the front alone, but she had no customers to bother her. She sat at the register reading a paperback romance she had picked up for a quarter at the front of the library. The lead was in love with her fiancé’s twin brother. He was infinitely more handsome despite being completely identical, and Mercedes was eager to see whether the fiancé would turn out to be evil somehow, or die tragically, or fall madly in love with someone else, or perhaps all three.

She shoved the book under the counter when the bell at the front jangled merrily. Unfortunately, Dedue was always more observant than Mercedes was expecting, given that he so very often seemed lost in his own world.

“I’m sorry to have interrupted your reading,” he said as Mercedes measured out teaspoons of ginger tea and fumbled to pour hot water into the pot. “You seemed very absorbed.”

“Not a worry at all!” Mercedes said brightly. “I’m always happy to see you, Dedue!” She had found out his name from Annette; he never seemed to use hers.

“Is it any good?” he asked after a pause, passing over her compliment. “I’d like to know if I should read it myself.”

“Ummmmm,” Mercedes said, reaching to catch a mug from the top shelf. She looked over her shoulder as her fingers fumbled blindly, and she saw him twitch forward slightly towards her, although he didn’t remark on the step-ladder Annette used that was sitting inches away from her. “I’ll have to let you know when I’ve finished.”

He nodded as her fingers grasped around the handle of a blue and red striped mug. “I look forward to it.”

Mercedes thrust the teapot into one of his hands and the mug into the other. “No charge today!” she said as he wrapped his fingers around the handle of the teapot and took it from her. “It’s on me.”

His eyes widened in surprise, as if she had offered him a house rather than a cup of tea. He glanced around the tea shop, and Mercedes knew without him saying it that he was thinking about profit margins with zero customers. “I couldn’t –” he started, but Mercedes cut him off.

“No no no!” she said brightly, grabbing her book from under the counter. “I insist! If you need anything else, just give me a holler.” She’d picked that phrase up from Annette, who said it much more charmingly than she managed.

She rushed back into the kitchen before he could object. She set amongst the profiteroles and tea cakes that no one was ordering, and wished she’d stayed at the register to read instead. Back here, she couldn’t keep track of which twin was which. She eventually settled for hovering by the door, counting and recounting the bakery stock for the day and poking her head around the corner. Dedue sat with his ginger tea and a book roughly the size of a dictionary, which just looked like a normal size book when he held it. He stayed the full three hours but didn’t ask for another pot of tea. She thought maybe he was watching when she came back to serve the other handful of customers, who all took their orders to go and without fanfare, but he didn’t approach the counter again. He poured and sipped his ginger tea very slowly.

When he left, he gave her a nod, which was often as warm as a smile, coming from him. “I look forward to your book review,” he said, buttoning up his coat and carefully tying his woolen scarf to avoid the wind.

“Did you enjoy yours? What was it about?” she asked.

“The scientific history and study of the wyvern and its sociopolitical implications for contemporary Fódlan,” Dedue said, wrinkling his nose. “I’m skeptical about its methodology. I am sure yours is much better.”

“We’ll see!” Mercedes said with a laugh that got caught awkwardly at the back of her throat. He might have smiled before he left, but it might have been the after-effects of the nod.

When she went to clear his table, he’d left cash under the plate, enough for three mugs of tea and a scone besides. In neat, precise handwriting, he’d scrawled the words “Thank you for your kindness” on the back of a library checkout slip for _The Soul of a Wyvern_.

*

Mercedes planned her next attempt carefully. She waited two weeks before she tried it; Dedue visited four times in those two weeks, with a different book and the same gentle nod each time.

On week three, she started baking extra, a different recipe every day. Dedue liked teas with cinnamon and ginger and rich, earthy spices, and as he never ordered a pastry, she had to work with that. She made gingerbread loaf with half the sugar. She made holiday cookies two months early. She revised her snickerdoodle recipe from childhood into thumbprint cookies, the cinnamon center warm and amber and perfect. Every night, she sent them home with Annette, to take to her book club or to see if the new boy she was talking to would actually eat them. Every night, she went home and looked up a recipe for something new, as if the previous attempts were now forever jinxed.

The day Dedue arrived in the shop, wearing reading glasses and an argyle sweater vest, Mercedes had made a pumpkin roll, her most ambitious project yet. She was carefully slicing perfect pinwheels when she heard Annette give a squeak. She peaked around the corner and the argyle alone almost caused her to drop her knife.

Mercedes willed herself to return to careful slicing – unless she was remarkably unlucky, Dedue would be here for at least a couple of hours. Cream and pumpkin spirals stared up at her cheerfully from the cutting board as she sliced the last one, and Mercedes gave a satisfied smile. They were gorgeous.

The Tupperware proved to be a larger challenge. The first one she pulled out from the shelf was comically large, and she felt ridiculous even holding it, let alone trying to give it to someone. But the next one she pulled out was too small. Only half the pumpkin roll even fit in it, and they squished together against each other, the spirals becoming distorted and jumbled. But at this point, pulling them out of the Tupperware would further warp them, so Mercedes left the other half of the spirals in the too-large Tupperware, snapped the lid tightly on her too-small Tupperware, and made her way out into the main shop, the unhappiest Goldilocks in all the land.

“Hello Dedue,” she called out, giving Annette a desperate look as she walked by to beg her to pay attention to literally anything else for the next 5 minutes. Annette propped her chin on her hands and stared unabashedly.

“Good afternoon,” he said solemnly, placing a thumb to mark his place in his book. “Are you needing this table? I didn’t mean to overstay.”

Mercedes glanced around the tea shop, which was surprisingly full for the afternoon. Perhaps the fall winds were convincing people to linger over hot drinks. “Of course not!” she said reproachfully. “You can always stay as long as you want; you know that.”

The half-smile again. “I’m grateful,” he said.

“I just came by because – I was wanting to see – oh dear,” Mercedes sighed. She was often scattered, but she had hoped rehearsing her suggestion three night in a row would have made matters better, not worse. She thrust the Tupperware out in front of her. “Do you like pumpkin things? These are rejects; we were going to sell them in the shop but they turned out so ugly!” She cast a smile at the pumpkin wheels, then, for being such good, squishable actors to go along with her lie. “You don’t have to take them if you don’t like them, but I’d hate to just throw them out.”

Dedue raised his eyebrows slightly, but took the offered Tupperware. It looked practically miniature in his hands. He looked down at the squiggle-spirals. “They look delicious,” he said, and Mercedes absolutely believed him. He looked up and the half-smile was gone, replaced by a worried frown. “I do not want to take all of them. Would Annette like some, perhaps?”

“Annie doesn’t like sweet things!” Mercedes blurted out. Then, realizing there were some lies that were too big to uphold, she corrected. “I – I mean, Annie doesn’t like _too many_ sweet things. We still have some more left, and her boyfriend won’t even try them, so we just have . . . so many.”

“Hm. He sounds very foolish,” Dedue said. He tucked the Tupperware away in a pocket of his bag, and looked up at Mercedes. “I look forward to trying them. What do I owe you?”

“Owe? Dedue! We don’t charge customers for _mistakes_ ,” Mercedes said insistently, patting the table beside his hand encouragingly. “Just let me know if you like them, so I can decide if they’re worth trying to make again.”

“I’m sure they’ll be perfect,” Dedue promise, and Mercedes hid her giggle and her blush behind the same hand.

“Felix is _not_ my boyfriend,” Annette hissed as Mercedes walked by the cash register. “I don’t even _like_ him that much, probably.”

“Absolutely . . . definitely, Annie,” Mercedes said cheerfully, giving a distracted look back at Dedue, who was adjusting his glasses as he returned to his book. “Did you want a slice of pumpkin roll?”

Mercedes missed the smirk Annette gave her as she followed her back into the kitchen.

Dedue left two hours later, the Tupperware tucked neatly in his bag. Annette marked the remaining pumpkin rolls up at five times their worth and they sold out within the first 3 hours. Tea shop patrons, as a whole, loved pumpkin accoutrement. All and all, it was a stunning success of a plan.

Until two days later, when Dedue returned the Tupperware, absolutely packed with food.

“What _are_ they?” Annette asked, staring through the transparent blue plastic.

“Curried tofu dumplings,” Dedue explained, and he sounded grave, but almost shy. “I also made chicken, but I realized I did not know if you were vegetarian or not. I can bring the chicken next time if you are not.”

“You _made_ them,” Annette repeated, passing the first, original Tupperware to Mercedes and staring down at the identical copy that Dedue had somehow produced to divide the dumplings into two portions. Mercedes could understand the awe in her voice. Even cold and through the Tupperware, they smelled amazing.

Dedue shrugged. “My roommate helped a bit,” he said.

“Dedue, we can’t take these,” Mercedes finally protested. “They must have taken _forever_ to make.”

Dedue frowned. “It’s a rather time-intensive recipe, I suppose, but I promise you they’re still quite good. Even my roommate approved of them, and he rarely has an opinion on such things.”

“No, I just mean – you can’t just _give_ us these,” Mercedes tried again, shaking the Tupperware slightly. The dumplings jostled merrily against one another.

Dedue’s eyes crinkled at the edges, and Mercedes couldn’t tell if he looked confused or deeply, deeply amused. “Is that not what you did with your pumpkin rolls? I am merely returning the favor.”

He turned to walk away towards his table, then looked back, suddenly remembering. “They were just as delicious as I’d expected, Mercedes,” he added. “If you do decide to make them again, I would gladly purchase a slice along with my drink.”

Mercedes was so upset about how nice a gift the dumplings were that it was five hours later before she realized he knew her name.

***

Fhirdiad was windy even in the temperate months, but the weather always took a sinister tone in late fall, when trees stood black and naked against rainy skies, their spidery branches reaching out to catch passers-by.

Mercedes’s raincoat was hung by the entrance, but she shivered all the same, wishing she’d brought an extra layer with her that afternoon. The shop was mostly empty, beyond the odd university student cramming for upcoming finals and one pair of gossiping friends that lingered over their tea cakes while recounting the minutia of a particularly salacious recent third date. The shop had been doing better recently, busy enough that they had discussed hiring someone else part time so that they could take the occasional day off. But after a morning that crawled by, Mercedes had no problem when Annette mentioned she might take an extra long lunch hour, as she was meeting a friend and would no doubt have her own salacious date stories to exchange. 

Mercedes had even less of a problem with this arrangement when the door blew open and Dedue hurried in, already shaking the rain out of his umbrella to neatly leave in the umbrella stand in the corner. He cut a dramatic figure in the doorway, rain glistening off his jacket and hair and the overcast sky over his shoulder. But, Mercedes reasoned, it was entirely possible she was simply projecting her book, a time-traveling romance that she suspected was extremely historically inaccurate, onto her own life, which was far more mundane.

“Good afternoon, Dedue,” she called out as he walked up to the counter. “It’s really coming down out there, isn’t it?”

“Indeed,” he said gravely. “I was foolish to park so far away.”

He ordered a pot of cinnamon tea and a pastry – he often ordered pastries now, to Mercedes’s delight, although he was prone to only eating half and wrapping the other half in a napkin to take with him. It was a familiar rhythm, as he asked after her book and she pulled the cinnamon tea from a possibly-too-high shelf behind her. But he frowned as she slid the teapot across the counter to him, his hands frantically reaching between his jacket pockets.

“Is everything alright?” Mercedes asked, raising her eyes in slight concern.

“My wallet – I must have forgotten –” Dedue sighed. “I am very sorry. And after you went to the trouble of preparing the tea for me.”

“Oh, and it’s raining. And you parked so far away,” Mercedes said sympathetically.

Dedue winced. “It’s worse than that, I fear. I’m fairly sure I left it on my kitchen counter.” He frowned, and Mercedes could have sworn he bowed slightly. “My apologies. I have wasted your time.”

“What are you – wait!” Mercedes exclaimed as Dedue turned, evidently to walk away. “Just take it, Dedue. I don’t mind, really. You’re already here!”

Dedue looked no less horrified by this suggestion than the last half a dozen times she offered him something. “It was my mistake, I could never –”

“Don’t be silly! You’re being silly,” Mercedes insisted. Dedue’s horror faded into a more pure shock – this was evidently an allegation he didn’t have to weather very often. “If it really matters that much, you can pay for it the next time you’re here. But I’ll probably have forgotten by then, so I wouldn’t worry about that.”

“Mercedes – thank you,” Dedue stumbled as Mercedes practically pushed the teapot of his edge of the counter in her effort to get him to take it from her.

“It’s nothing!” Mercedes sang. 

This was a lie. It was everything. It was _success_. Such success, to finally have a chance to do something nice for Dedue and his gentle smile and his olive rainjacket and the beaten up paperback murder mystery he’d brought that day, carried Mercedes through the next three hours, and through the afternoon after he left, and well into the evening. She was still floating on that success when she told Annette she would close up the shop that evening, as once again they seemed low on customers and Annette was high on social engagements, this time a potential text from Felix to watch a documentary on dangerous amusement parks in the 80s. Mercedes was dividing her attention between reveling in her success, skimming her time-traveling romance novel (which she had decided wasn’t very good), and scrolling through texts from Annette complaining that Felix hadn’t called yet when the bell above the front door jingled merrily over the rushing wind from the outside. Mercedes looked up in surprise and slight annoyance – they would be closed within ten minutes, and she had been looking forward to doing a face mask when she got home, so she was not inclined to look kindly on any customers lingering 15 minutes past closing. But she recognized the familiar umbrella shake and silhouette, and gave an exclaim of surprise before she could stop herself.

“Dedue!” she said, shocked. “You’re back!”

“I hope you won’t think me rude,” he said as he walked up to the front counter again. “I realize you’re closing shortly; it was not my intention to keep you here any longer tonight.”

Mercedes blinked in surprise as he pulled out his wallet and placed cash on the counter in front of her. “When I said you could pay the next time you were here,” she said slowly. “I meant in three days or something. You didn’t have to come all this –” she cut herself off as she looked up at him and realized he looked quite different. Instead of his knitted sweaters and warmly colored scarves, Dedue was wearing crisp, tailored suit, with his hair pulled back severely. “Are you going on a – are you going somewhere nice?” she asked before she could stop herself.

“I’m on my way to work,” Dedue explained simply. “You were on my way.”

“Oh,” Mercedes said. “Where do you work?”

“Securities,” Dedue replied. Mercedes waited for him to elaborate. He did not.

“That’s nice!” she finally said with a weak smile. “Do you remember how much your order was? I can get you change.”

“Please, don’t worry about that,” Dedue said, and Mercedes bit her tongue to accuse him of hypocrisy. He looked around the empty tea shop. “I imagine you’ll want to close up and go home soon.”

“You’re not wrong!” Mercedes said, thinking of that face mask she’d promised herself. And maybe a candle. She glanced towards the front window of the shop. “Any chance the rain has gotten better? I also parked regrettably far away today.”

Dedue frowned, even more deeply than usual. “Did you?” he asked. He glanced towards the front window, as well. “It’s quite dark out, this time of year,” he said.

Mercedes smiled. “The dark doesn’t bother me, Dedue, that’s just how nighttime works. I’m more worried about the rain.”

“Of course,” Dedue said. “I wish I had better news to give you.”

“I have my raincoat! Don’t you worry!” Mercedes said, with more cheer than she felt. It had been only a drizzle when she’d arrived at work this morning, and she’d foolishly left her umbrella in her trunk.

Dedue turned from the window. “If you don’t mind me waiting – I could walk you to your car, if you’d like.” He gestured abstractly towards his umbrella, and Mercedes smiled even more brightly.

“I would like that,” she assured him.

Mercedes suspected that at least 70% of Dedue was getting drenched by the rainstorm as they walked down the side streets that led the free street parking she’d found that morning His umbrella was very large, but the rain was practically falling sideways that evening, and he was doing his utmost to hold the umbrella over her while keeping a respectable enough distance between them that Mercedes suspected they could have fit an Annette and a half between them.

She fumbled in her bag for her keys – it was one of those floppy cloth bags that looked cute with everything and had absolutely no structural integrity for actually storing items – and Dedue patiently waited, the sleeve of his suit slowly turning from dark grey to black as the raindrops converged against each other.

“Here we are!” she said brightly, pulling out her keys and jangling them in front of Dedue’s face, as if to prove to him that she had, in fact, had them all along, and she was not simply rifling through her bag for absolutely nothing in an elaborate ploy to ruin his suit or give him a cold.

“Here we are,” he repeated with a solemn nod. His eyes flickered left and right down the back street. Mercedes’ was the only car left this time of evening, but the street would soon fill up with bachelorette parties driving in from the suburbs and Thursday night college kids getting a jump start on the weekend. A little sideways rain wouldn’t stop the nightlife in downtown Fhirdiad.

“Did you park close to here?” Mercedes asked, slinging her bag over her shoulder and giving a performative look down the abandoned street.

“Unfortunately, I chose the opposite direction,” Dedue said, sounding no less upset than when he mentioned a book he was reading was rather dull. “It’s less of a walk than you had, but I’ll have to go back by the shop.”

“Oh, I’ve really ruined your night!” Mercedes said, her heart sinking. She glanced at her own car, the passenger seat dry and safe and only mildly covered in discarded takeout coffee cups, and she was struck by a sudden flash of inspiration. “If you’d like, I can drive you over to your car?” she asked, smiling up at him.

Dedue frowned – a legitimate frown, not his normal, neutral face of vague discontentment. Mercedes could feel her smile faltering, slightly. He sighed slightly before he spoke. “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he said, and continued on before Mercedes could protest. “You barely know me. It would be – I wouldn’t want you to feel unsafe.”

Mercedes felt her smile turn from a falter to an outright scowl. It was an unfair thing for Dedue to insinuate. She didn’t like the implication that he wasn’t a kind, gentle person. She didn’t like that he thought she had to be reminded how to take care of herself. She didn’t like that he thought the situation was unsafe, or could be unsafe, or that he thought she hadn’t done the calculations already, dozens of times, before extending the invitation.

He was probably right, objectively speaking. But Mercedes liked that least of all.

And so instead of laughing and agreeing and apologizing for being thoughtless, which was what she normally did in situations like this, Mercedes surprised Dedue, and surprised herself more, by throwing her jangly keys into her shapeless bag and stepping out of the safety of the umbrella to better cross her arms and glare at him.

“For the love of the goddess, Dedue,” she said, her voice sharp and higher pitched than she wanted. “Will you ever just let me be _nice to you_?”

Dedue stared at her in shocked silence for a moment, Mercedes’s frustrated accusation disappearing into the sound of rain on the pavement and car hood. Then, bewildered and possibly not thinking, he angled his umbrella so it was covering Mercedes again, an act so thoughtful and so aggravating that Mercedes wanted to scream.

“I don’t understand,” he said slowly, dark polka dot raindrops already appearing on his right shoulder. “You’ve always been . . . nice to me. You’re one of the kindest people I know.”

“Thank you! I try to be!” Mercedes said, absolutely exasperated. “But you won’t let me do anything nice for _you_. You won’t take a free scone, or let me cover you when you forget your wallet – you won’t let me take care of _anything_.”

She’d studied Dedue from the corner of the tea shop more often and for far longer than she cared to admit. She’d never seen his expression now – something between confusion and guilt and panic. He almost seemed to slouch as she hurled words at him, although when she blinked at him again his posture was as good as always.

“These are not things I deserve,” he said, finally, looking down at her. “When I say you are kind, I mean I value your conversation, you smile. I’m not looking for . . . more than I have a right to ask for. I’m just a customer in your tea shop, Mercedes; I know you have many other friends who deserve your attention more.”

“You’re not _just_ a customer, you’re my _favorite_ customer,” Mercedes insisted, filing his entire previous sentence away to unpack with Annette the next time they had five free hours to spare. She began listing things off on her fingers, the keys in her bag rattling from her exaggerated gestures. “You’re so polite, you always leave a tip, you make Annette laugh but you don’t hit on her, you always have something nice to say about the pastries, you’re just – it’s so nice when you’re around!”

Dedue raised his eyebrows. “That bar seems extremely low, Mercedes.”

“Well, I still want to be nice to you!” Mercedes said. She reached up and pressed against the umbrella handle, gently pushing it so it was covering Dedue. “I just care about you, that’s all. And you won’t let me.”

Dedue rested his hand against his mouth, obscuring his frown as he took in what she said. Then, slowly, as if he expected her to run away or push him again, he tilted the umbrella upwards, taking a step forward so it covered both of them.

Badly. Half of Mercedes and a full three-quarters of Dedue were still left exposed to the rain. But at least he was trying.

“I am sorry I made you feel as if I don’t appreciate what you do,” he said carefully. “I. . . do. I’m just not used to accepting things from people when I cannot give them anything in return.”

“Don’t be silly,” Mercedes said. Dedue looked like he was getting better at accepting such an accusation. It was possible he smiled. Mercedes returned the smile a tenfold. “Friendship shouldn’t be about give and take, Dedue. I’m not expecting anything from you, either, you know.”

“Do you want to get coffee sometime?” Dedue asked, rather suddenly, but with the same gravitas he always had, as if it was the inevitable thing to ask, or as if he’d been thinking about the question for a long time.

And Mercedes realized that maybe, even if she hadn’t been expecting that, she had been wanting it.

“I’d love that,” she said. And he definitely smiled back this time.

He still wouldn’t accept her offer for a drive back to his car. Evidently the walk “was not a problem,” no matter how many skeptical faces Mercedes pulled. Still, as he walked Mercedes around to the driver’s side door and patiently held the umbrella while she rummaged around again for her keys again, Mercedes felt like maybe the rain was letting up a bit, tonight.

She certainly felt that everything was sunshine as she drove home.

**Author's Note:**

> I have never read The Soul of an Octopus, Agent Zigzag, or The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I have heard, from various sources and for various reasons, that they are all very good. I have watched Class Action Park though and I can confirm that it absolutely fucking rules.
> 
> I feel like I’ve read several fics where a background detail is that Mercedes reads trashy romance novels? And tons of them aren’t even modern AUs, she’s just chilling in the Garreg Mach cathedral reading a bodice-ripper. I guess the only canon-confirmed romance fans are Hapi and Ashe, but I can dig it for Mercedes, too. I feel like she reads the mass paperbacks at work when she’s easily distracted, and saves the really quality Evvie Drake Starts Overs and Red White and Royal Blues for when she’s at home and can have a glass of wine and give it her full attention. 
> 
> Anyway! I haven’t been to a coffee shop since March and it’s like a high of 90 today, so I hope you don’t mind some lurid, shameless escapism about wearing lots of plaid and eating pumpkin-based things. A girl can dream.
> 
> [Twitter links for me!](https://twitter.com/Rose3Writes) And [ twitter links for Mercedue Week! ](https://twitter.com/mercedue_week) It's been a fun week, guys, thanks for reading!


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